Why are we more expensive?
One question keeps coming up: Why are we charging for installation, and why is our monthly prices more expensive than others?
We provide rural broadband - and as such we have to provide a far higher level of support. Weekdays we cover 8am-5pm, and weekends 10am-4pm for emergency fixes.
When you call our engineers, you usually get our engineers.
When things break - such as when someone's dead tree took out some fibre lines - we were able to install fixed wireless to get folks up and running whilst we waited for the repair. And where you already have our fixed wireless network in place (and is practicable), we can leave this in place as a backup.
Or when Storm Malik blew through, blowing over one of our main transmitter sites. We had folks back up and running within 36 hours, despite having to rebuild the entire site from scratch. In gale force winds. Whilst our office (and home) had no power for 5 days.
Our engineers come to your property and help you install the wireless service to your devices.
If you fall into hard times, usually a quick call is all it takes to sort issues out, work out payment plans and such like. We have not had to - yet - get debt collectors involved.
Contention ratios. The larger budget players will have 20 (on a good day) up to 50 (on a bad day) customers fighting for the same piece of internet bandwidth. This ratio is called the Contention ratio. That's why the budget providers networks rarely give you the package speeds, and all slow down at peak periods (between 7pm and 11pm each night). We have a contention ratio closer to 6:1. Less contention means better service.
And we're honest. There are other providers in the marketplace who have blatantly lied to their customers. We don't do that. We might not give you the answer you want - but we'll always give you the answer you need.
We have dealt with mountains of paperwork for grant schemes to get our customers the best service we can provide - sometimes for free. Currently, we're going through the Scottish Broadband Voucher Scheme (SBVS) for a project in Memus, the Department of Culture's 'Gigabit' project for a project near Marykirk, and of course OpenReach, for our new fibre customers. Let me assure you, none of these processes were easy to get into, and some continue to be a complete nightmare. We do this so you don't have to.
As we don't have tens of thousands of customers (yet), we have to do this with very little supplier discounts - unlike the larger, budget players.
All of which means that we can't charge the 'We'll give you this at a discount for 18 months, and then double your monthly fees' that the budget providers give (always check the small print, folks!). And we have to charge our cost price for the installation, because otherwise we'd be out of business.
So we get it. Times are very tight right now, and only appear to be getting tighter. Some people are very budget focused - as they should be - and of course will go to cheaper services.
If all internet providers were the same, and offered the same levels of support, then why not?
But if you feel that you need your internet to work, and you need someone to come fix it if it breaks - we're here for you.
Bill, Ashley, Liam and Martin